Anybody who cites — with approval — both Fabian Pascal and Joe Celko can’t be all bad. “Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases” is a bit polemic, but on the whole it’s a good reminder of why relational-bashing often is overdone.

Personally, I think the applications for which traditional schema-heavy relational/SQL programming make sense are less interesting that those for which it doesn’t — but the world is indeed chock full of less interesting tasks.